What is the story/characters about?

[iminlikewithyou]

starting the post - i just want to make it clear that characters like Lame and Vivi are characters designed for express purposes in their respective games or places - they aren't "story" characters, they're more of "functional" characters.

to expand on that, Lame is a bot designed to fit in in places where we'd need a bot player to fill in a slot or to "run games" as you'd see in Word Bomb Mini on Discord. so in OMG if we ever had a game where we'd need a bot player, we can put in Lame Bot and it's super cute and much better than just slotting in something boring and uninteresting.
this same kind of idea is imposed with Vivi, where really I could have just made a super boring bot and eventually made a super boring website like Merriam-Webster where you just go through a bland dictionary, but by adding this personality, all of a sudden it becomes really interesting, fun, and playful and really ties you in that this is a cohesive universe with all these cute characters that fit in together.
(our blackjack game that's coming up would be really cute with a nice dealer character!)

so anytime we can create a character for an express purpose we probably should - but it's hard sometimes because we should also consider looking ahead and thinking about the future since I don't want to limit OMG to just web or Roblox. expanding the universe to other places too would be amazing if we can! if we eventually decided on making a 3D game outside of web or roblox, like Unreal Engine or something, is there a place where our character can fit in? what traits can we give the character so they can fit in? what if we wanted to make a cute little short story? Lame or Vivi could be cute in that. these are all things i personally think about when creating characters.

if two characters could possibly interact with each other, and you think there could be some sort of story there that we could write about, i'm totally down to write a short story to share with everyone which would be really cool!!

i wanna give the example of Bennie which is a recent character i came up with to solve various problems in the universe. i described Bennies like this:

Bennies are anthropomorphic teddy bears which love to help carry people around. Notably, Lame Bot lacks any sort of mobility and requires an escort such as Bennie to move around. Bennie is capable of carrying most characters with one arm and is capable of performing various other actions with the other.

so not only does this solve issues such as Lame's dependency on others to move around and interact with the world, but imagine we wanted to make a platformer game similar to Mario. now we have a character similar to Yoshi where the player can be picked up and carried around and perform secondary actions with Bennie (which i don't know what that would be - but it can be figured out later). how about in Burst! - Bennie could be walking around replacing tiles since he likes to help and carry things! it would be cute seeing him run away from bombs you throw at him! and it's very easy to turn into MERCH! imagine being able to buy a teddy bear of him, that would be awesome :D

so story and characters are much more integral to the experience we make as you might think - and just "making games" isn't the only thing we have to think about when crafting characters and story, we can do a lot more and try things out.